Pilots, air traffic controllers, airline personnel and the like routinely monitor meteorological data, reports, and forecasts to assess any potential impacts on the current or anticipated flight plan and the intended destination. However, in situations where the aircraft needs to deviate from the original plan, such as an emergency situation, the information needs to be reanalyzed with respect to the deviation to facilitate continued safe operation. For example, in the case of an emergency landing, ideally a pilot would select an airport within range of the aircraft where landing is least likely to be compromised or complicated by weather or other factors. This requires consideration of numerous pieces of information (e.g., fuel remaining and distance to be traveled, weather radar and/or forecast information, NOTAMs, SIGMETs, PIREPs, and the like), which often is distributed across different displays or instruments, requiring the pilot to mentally piece together all the different information from the different sources. Additionally, in the case where the information for the first airport analyzed discourages landing there, the pilot must repeat the task of aggregating and analyzing the information for one or more additional airports.
In some situations, during pre-flight briefing, a pilot may desire to preselect alternate or diversion airports along the flight plan for potential use en route to the destination. While the foregoing demands of mentally piecing together different information from different sources persists, the pilot must also analyze the information with respect to locations along the flight plan. Moreover, once en route, the viability of a preselected alternate may change without the pilot's awareness. Thus, in the event of an emergency, due to the mental stress and exigent nature of operation, the pilot may revert to a preselected airport that is suboptimal or less viable than when originally selected. To remedy the situation, the pilot is again faced with the task of reanalyzing the different information from different sources during an emergency situation, which further increases the pilot's workload. Accordingly, it is desirable to reduce the mental workload of the pilot (or air traffic controller, or the like) when analyzing and selecting alternates en route to a destination.